A colossus that I think only Hanya Yanagihara could give us. A Little Life's strongest quality is the way it champions friendship and its complexities, but in To Paradise, she presents friendship as both necessary and a salvation while fickle and inconsistent. Her characters either can't decide if they believe in people, or their actions show that how we connect with and cherish people are all we have in common. The threads through the stories are that of love and its contours. We have romance, delusion, and disease. 

Another sadly beautiful book, it is it a beautifully sad book?, by Hanya Yanagihara. Haunting. It’ll start with me a long time, just like A little Life. Grateful to have read it.

The writing is beautiful but ultimately I just found this book deeply frustrating. Go into this book knowing you will not get all the answers you might want. I also found the repeated character names across the stories added needless confusion. 
I think most reviews I've seen thought the second story was the worst one but that was probably my favourite. I much preferred the first two to the final story in the volume. Maybe I just wasn't ready to read about pandemics though! The author certainly does a good job describing a dystopian future. 

The  sections of this book weave together in a fascinating, imaginative way. Yanagihara develops three plots and sets of characters that, when combined, offer reflective insight into relationship dynamics, societal and familial standards, and what it means to be a flawed human. I feared this would not live up to the reputation of her previous novel, but it is entirely different and equally enthralling.

CW: pandemic, lab testing on animals, armed police, dystopia, military law, radicalisation/terrorism, chronic illness, seizures, environmental destruction, arranged marriage, internment camps etc.

Spanning roughly 200 hundred years this is a book about a world similar to our own but subtly different. It starts in the 1890s in an America which has some areas where it is legal to marry anyone you wish. It discusses 1990s in the same place only with a backdrop of the looming spectre of HIV. The final part is in the 2090s after waves of pandemics have changed the face of the First World into a dystopian vision of strict controls and segregation.

The book discusses health and frailty, chronic illness, being gay, the idea of inheritance and Legacy, life and treatment of migrants of ethnic minority, and love, feud, vulnerability, and .. people being people.

When I got the audiobook I had no idea it was such a long read (over 900 pages or 28+hours in the Audiobook) but the story wasn't really slow.. it just had a LOT in it. It seemed a poetic decision to have a recurring set of names and places. Partly this was to reinforce the continuity of lineage, inheritance and flow of time. Looking at things from different cultural perspectives over time highlights the changes caused by the passage of time, but also the similarities.

This book is artful and tells the stories within it through letters, memories, and stories told to others. It leans hard into the Hawaiian / Pacific Islands' oral tradition, and also highlights the place of those shared stories we tell each other, and how they cement families and communities. It also shows how that knowledge can be so fragile and be lost to time when ideas are not shared or if they cannot be passed on well.

This story starts as a piece of historical speculative fiction, but the latter parts of the book are set in a police state. Published in 2022, this book clearly channels a lot of the common ground we have experienced in the face of global pandemic. Freedom of information, and the radicalisation of rebels and conspiracy theorists against government control, are sympathetically highlighted by the use of main characters on both sides of the fence, one working for the government to limit the casualties of disease, and one fighting against government misinformation and lack of social freedoms.

For all the big ideas, the thing that really sells this whole book to me is the solid characters. The feelings expressed and the stuff they are going through really resonate with me. A number of the characters over the span of the book deal with anxiety, trauma and  chronic physical illness. The relationships formed are often oddly unbalanced, either due to finances, physical/emotional frailty, or even just charisma, and the problems those couples have feel very real to me.

I could go on, but it would be too much. The characters were believable and human, and representation of disability and mental illness was relatable. The discussion of migrants and ethnic minority was an element I valued, and I loved that with the use of Hawaiian language I could still pick up one word in three due to its similarity with te reo Māori (which I  only have a very basic familiarity with).  This was a really good book, and I should have read it last year.